Her Bad Mother

Friday, March 6, 2009

All About My Mother

When my nephew, Zachary, was about four years old, my mother pulled a prank on him. This was not at all unusual - according to my mother, children only become fun once they're of an age to be messed with, and her relationships with her grandchildren are guided by this rule - but this particular prank was pretty epic. She staged an alligator attack in one of the closets in her home - complete with stuffed alligator and screaming granny and arm pulled under sleeve to simulate dismemberment - and Zachary was, I do not exaggerate in saying, alarmed by the whole spectacle. Thrilled, too - he talked about it, delighted, for months - but in the moment, mostly alarmed. And mad, in that adorably outraged manner that only small children can effect.

You, he said, pointing at my mother, areBAD. She just laughed.

She is bad, I agreed. She is very bad. She's your bad grandma.

No, he replied, stamping his foot and pointing an accusatory finger at me. She's NOT my bad grandma. She is YOUR BAD MOTHER.

And with that, a parenting philosophy was born, and a blog predestined.

My mom has always been a bad mother. Not in the neglectful sense: she was, for most of my childhood, a stay-at-home mom who baked cookies and led Girl Guide troops and did crafts and told hour upon hour of bedtime stories (and lunchtime stories, and camptime stories, and going-for-a-walk stories, and riding-in-the-car stories...) It's just that with everything that she did, she put her own enjoyment of the activity at the forefront. Childhood, as she understood it, was a time of fun and magic, and dammit if she wasn't going to take advantage of that for herself. She'd waited a long time to throw herself into motherhood, and she wasn't going to waste the opportunity by approaching the whole thing as work. Child-rearing, in her view, was just one long exercise in applied fun and amusement. So it was that the cookies were sometimes made in ridiculous shapes (don't ask) and the crafts were more often reflections of her own interests and obsessions (during the tenure of Pierre Trudeau as Canadian Prime Minister, who she loathed, we made something that she called TURD-ohs, which I'll leave to your imagination) and the stories often took perverse but fascinating turns (it was a long time before I understood that my sister had not been found in a pickle patch and that my bum wouldn't fall off if I unscrewed my belly-button.) She took delight in surprising us and startling us and making the world seem like an unpredictable and fascinating place, filled with benevolent but arm-nibbling monsters and tyrannical fairies and and friendly but overtaxed families of pickle-imps and tiny, turd-like goblins who carried placards decrying the rule of the Liberal Party of Canada.

It was awesome.

I knew, from childhood, that I wanted to be a mother just like her. And I knew from the moment that Zachary called her BAD that that meant being a bad mother.

Which is what I'm trying to be, with some success, I think. She, in the meantime, has moved on to fully embracing her role as a bad grandmother, as the New York Times reported yesterday. (Yeah, you read that right.) Which means that she's still all about the fun and the games and the perversity, but also that she's doing it on her terms. And those terms follow this principle: it is, in anything other than extraordinary circumstances (and she does, for the record, grandma-up if circumstances demand it), only about the fun. She's not interested in being an on-call babysitter (she loves to spend time with her grandchildren, but refuses to regard it as a duty), she's not interested in changing diapers (been there/done that) and she's not interested in having her grandmahood defined according to any conventional, matronly terms. The great thing about being a grandmother, in her opinion, is getting to have all of the fun with little of the labour, and she takes full advantage of that.

Which, again, is awesome, but - as I told the New York Times - it's also a little frustrating, sometimes. I love that my mom is something of an iconoclast, that she's independent and contrary and entirely forthright about who she is and how she wants her relationships to work. But I would be lying if I said that I didn't wish, sometimes, that she was the type of grandma who swooped in and gathered babies to her chest and shooed me off to have a nap while she changed diapers and made lasagna (she makes awesome lasagna, by the way), that she were the type of grandma who demanded babysitting duty, who wanted to just move in and help - or, at least, fly out regularly to help. I have, at times during my pregnancies and my post-partums, just wanted my mommy to step in and make things all better, to just take over and be the apron-clad grandma who tutors her daughter in the ways of motherhood and offers free babysitting on the side. But she's not that - she's always been more of a hug-you-warmly-stroke-your-head-and-help-you-figure-out-how-fix-things-*yourself* kind of mom - and she's always been clear about that and never made any apologies for that and I can't help but think that she wouldn't be the awesome bad grandma that she is if it weren't for that.

My tutelage, at the knees of my mother, in the ways of motherhood has always been about this - this spirit of unconventionality, this emphasis on encouraging independence, this insistence upon doing things, whenever possible, out of joy rather than duty, this celebration of being, in some ways, bad - and I do that education an injustice if I demand that my mother be, as a grandmother, anything other her own bad self.

So I'll manage without the free babysitting and the unsolicited domestic help and the demands for more time with her grandchildren, and let her get on with that bad self.

And I'll get on with mine.

(Am leaving the family for an overnight trip to New York tonight, which is awesome, but, also, terrifying. I've never left Jasper for more than a few hours - and he's never gone more than a few hours without the boob - but we figure that the break will be good for him and for me. We're right about that, right? Right?Am freaking out a little bit.)

*Photo by Arantxa Cedillo (who so graciously overlooked all the mess in my house, and who sweetly exclaimed over my copy of the Todo Sobre Mi Madre film poster, thereby making me feel a little bit as though I'd made up for being a slob) for the New York Times

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Truthiness In Muffin-Top Portraiture

You're going to have to see my previous post for context - or to comment, if you have anything to say, anything at all, about the Glory Of The Previously Only Seen In Soft-Focus Muffin Top - because I'm only going to say this, and I want it to stand alone as my affirmation - my own affirmation, to myself - of my acceptance of my soft, fleshy, beautiful self: this is my belly. It gave life to my children. It turns on my husband. It digests cupcakes. It could be firmer, it could be trimmer, it could fit more neatly into a pair of skinny jeans, but who cares? It is my belly.

And I like it.

(I dare you to post yours. You can do so anonymously at The Belly Project, but if you dare to do it at your own blog, or on Flickr - I even set up a Flickr group, if you're interested - or somewhere a little less anonymous - somewhere where you say hell YEAH this is me, I'd love to know. Send me an e-mail or leave a comment on the previous, less-brave post where, yes, I am taking compliments on my skills with soft-focus photography.)

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

What Does A Body Good

This is me, nine and half months post-partum:

In which I reveal my muffin-top, my inability to properly clean mirrors, and the fact that my personal trainer is a Siamese cat.

I'm okay with how I look. Sort of. I think. Some days are better than others. Some days, I look down at the plush landscape of my body - the belly with its rippled hillocks, the mountainous breasts under snowy swaths of cotton - and I think, well, it's a mother's body. It's a new mother's body. It's the body of a nursing mother, a mother who is run ragged by a preschooler and has no time or energy for focused exercise, a mother who has learned the hard and disappointing way that preschooler-wrangling and baby-hoisting do not, contrary to expectation, tone the muscles. It's the body of a mother who is in her thirties, and who does not have personal trainers or dietitians on call. It's not the body of Gwyneth Paltrow, dammit. Wanna make something of it?

Some days, I am accepting of my body; some days, I get defensive. Some days, the line between forgiving myself for not having the body that I had four years ago and berating myself for same gets blurred beyond recognition, for the simple reason that the very idea of needing to ask forgiveness of myself for something that is in no wise a wrongdoing confounds any effort on my part to accept myself, my body, as good. (The very idea is toxic, is it not? That I have transgressed myself for allowing my body to become matronly, for having put my energies into nourishing my baby and raising my little girl instead of shredding my body back to pre-maternal form? That I need to forgive myself for something that I should celebrate, something for which I - I believe this, I do - deserve praise?) I need to move past this idea that the reality of my body is something that I need to explain/justify/forgive. I need to allow myself to just be the physical being that I am - lumpy, imperfect. And to do that I need, maybe, to find ways of thinking and speaking (and writing) about myself that are a little less accusatory (lumpy, imperfect) and a little more celebratory (soft, strong, life-giving, perfectly suited to nourishing babies and cradling children.)

(I have a nearly perfect sense-memory, from childhood, of my own mother's body: the soft curve of flesh on her back, between her breast and her shoulder blade, just under her upper arm, where my hand would rest when I snuggled against her, and the plush pillow of her belly, where I would sometimes rest my head, and the sweet-smelling skin - part Diorissimo, part flour-and-sugar, part soap - at the back of her neck, where I would bury my face to sob over some childish disaster or another, or to rest, or just to feel at peace. It was always soft and fragrant and reassuring - there were no hard edges, no unyielding surfaces - and it enveloped me and comforted me. It still does, when I think of it, of her. I want my children to remember me this way - as a space/place/body of comfort and safety and love.)

And yet... I do want this body, my body, to be my own. I want to return, in some significant way, to the relationship that I had with my body when it was all mine, when I regarded it selfishly and proudly, when I vainly primped it and polished it and when I casually disregarded it and - yes, sometimes - misused and abused it. (The days of subjecting it to diet Coke and cigarettes and all-night clubbing and all the petty and not-so-petty abuses that all-night clubbing entails are long behind me - thank god - but I do long, sometimes, to not pass on that third glass of wine, to not put my body's status as a life-giving, child-nurturing organism first in any consideration of whether to drink more or stay up later or have that fourth espresso.)

So here I am, stuck between wanting to love my body as it is, and wanting to change it, and it's so tempting to throw my hands in the air and wander off in search of another cupcake, or, alternatively, to berate myself for wanting the cupcake and then to drop to the floor and do two or three sit-ups before deciding that it's not worth the effort and getting up and looking for that cupcake anyway, after which I will just feel alternately guilty and self-satisfied. And this is the problem, right? That however much I love my body the way that it is, there's still that part of me that wants to love it more. Rightly or wrongly, I want more from my body - not for my children, not for my husband, not for my shred-happy friends (who I enthusiastically support, by the way) - but for me. Just for me.

Which, translated into a course of action, means this: a cupcake, some coffee and some gentle Sun Salutations. And then, maybe, when it gets warmer, a run around the block, or a bike-ride with my girl. And if I ever get around to shredding, great, but if not? I'll just enjoy the fact that my belly is soft, comforting place on which tired little heads can rest. I'll just celebrate being strong and soft. And then I'll have another cupcake.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

And On The Seven-Hundred And Second Day, She Took It All Back

The gods, they were listening, and they did not approve. That, or you all weren't making the necessary sacrifices on my behalf. Which I understand, sort of, because good sheets (the sleep gods' preferred object of sacrifice) are a thing to treasure, but still. We're talking about sleep here, the loss of which is all the more painful after you've luxuriated in its sweet embrace for a couple of days (and after you've tossed your supply of Ativan, in premature celebration of your reunion with Morpheus and Hypnos who, it turns out, were just in it for a two-night stand, the bastards.)

I am now going into mourning, and, also, am rummaging through the trash to find that bottle of Ativan.